The Sounds of Silence: Reflections on an Absence Part 1

Of all the things which vanished beneath the influx of Coronavirus in March, live music is the one I miss most of all. In the warmer months I can do without the stuffy interiors of London's pubs, to say nothing of their elevated prices and near ubiquitous bad taste in piped music.  In the 90s and early 2000s London was awash with what used to be called "stand-up drinking" bars. An apt description for bare rooms blasting out bottom drawer House and Garage as a soundtrack to high speed alcopop and cheap lager abuse. 

 

The premise was simple and still holds true, that if you deprive the punter of their capacity for discourse - principally somewhere to sit and the ability to converse with others without spittling directly into their ears - then they tend to fall back onto swigging whatever beverage they happen to be holding. This greatly increases both the house's revenue and work for the door staff and local constabulary. Those days are largely gone from the London area, but the tendency for pubs and bars to pump out garbage from their licensed speaker systems has sadly remained. Hence my frustration at the prospect of yet more months deprived of London's live music scene.

London's Astoria just prior to demolition

The shutdown came at a time when I was spending more of my unlaboured hours at London's music venues than ever before, with 2019 having been an especially memorable year for shows. Many of the city's larger and medium sized venues have gone the way of the dodo over the last 20 years, with rapacious developers, Crossrail and general mismanagement being the main causes. Of particular regret was the loss of the Astoria on the Charing Cross Road where I enjoyed many a sweaty night during the late 90s and early 2000s, watching bands like Pitchshifter, Katatonia and emo-cybergoth darlings VNV Nation. I'd never really enjoyed arena gigs, the sound always being such a disappointment. Repurposed warehouses like the thankfully demolished Docklands Arena and the O2 Arena (housed in Tony Blair's Great White Elephant the Millennium Dome) are little more than airy placeholders around which cluster the usual dour set of main-street eateries and overpriced corporate booze vendors.

 

It was only last year that I had my first experience of the latter as a venue for live music, having never before had occasion to fork out the entry price for an uncomfortable seat up in the Gods of the O2. Massive Attack's reprise of their truly classic album Mezzanine was what had me trekking round Greenwich Peninsular that mild February evening, past the concrete factory and recycling centre. And then, emerging out of the gloom, in the midst of all that dust and grime is a driving range, floodlights glaring out across the Thames towards Canary Wharf. Coming across its high boundary fence rising into the dark winter sky was most disorientating.  This is an area which symbolises the piecemeal way much of the East of London has been developed over the last few decades. During the 19th and much of the 20th century it was home to the Capital's heavy industry, including an asbestos plant and Europe's largest gas works. 

The O2 Arena

The opening of the Blackwall tunnel in 1897 connected the by then heavily contaminated soil of Bugsby's marshes with the docks on the north side of the Thames. Even with the arrival of the London Underground in 1999 it still has the feel of an isolated place to me, somewhere you put things out of way. Massive Attack's set, 150 yards ahead and below my position was a fug of incomprehensible bass and juddering percussion. All the finely crafted dynamics of their dark dub-rock masterpiece were lost in the acoustic illiteracy of that giant tent. Thankfully the shear sonic force needed to fill such large spaces naturally excluded a lot of the music I was getting into in my 20s. By my 30s I naturally tended towards the city's numerous intimate venues.

 

2019 had started auspiciously with a week-long festival at Cafe Oto dedicated to the music of the late French composer and electronic music pioneer Luc Ferrari. I've written about him before  where I talked about his capacity to craft sensual  - dare I say sexy - tape compositions, brimming with desire. The four shows I attended in the second week in February took in every facet of Ferrari's oeuvre, from his "anecdotal" tape compositions,  scored and improvised instrumental works and some of the wilder examples of his musical imagination. Now, Cafe Oto is one of those places that gets under your skin. It was opened in 2008 by Hamish Dunbar and his partner Keiko Yamamoto and has since then forged a deserved reputation as London's premier venue for experimental and improvised music. 

 

I first started going around 2011, though I have no memory of what I saw on that occasion. What sticks in my mind from that evening was the shock at having boarded a London Overground train at Richmond to step out 45 minutes later at Dalston Kingsland into what looked like another city. This was prior to the shockwave of gentrification emanating from Hoxton and Shoreditch reaching that far up the A10. Whatever it was I saw that evening was the first of countless gigs I've attended at this most cherished of venues. Last year was a record at seventeen visits.

 

As the name indicates, Oto is a cafe during the day, a single low ceilinged room with no obvious stage, peppered with a few small marble-topped tables and distinctly uncomfortable wooden chairs. At one end is the bar and at the other the sound system, rigged up upon a gantry, hanging from the ceiling, speakers pointing out in three directions above an otherwise unremarkable area of concrete floor. At night the place is transformed. The little tables and chairs are arranged around the ostensible performance area, which can be anywhere in the room, not just between the speakers. Recently they've taken a leaf out of the Boiler Room's book and started having the more dance orientated acts perform at a table in the centre of the space, allowing the audience to surround them. Hiro Kone's set which I saw in November was run this way. 

 

Jenny Hval at Cafe Oto 2015 (picture - tim@encosion.com)

The first night of the Ferrari festival I witnessed had French turntable wizard ErikM deconstructing the late composer's concrete sound archive with help from Scanner (Robin Rimbaud) and Thurston Moore; yes that Thurston Moore, who is apparently a denizen of Stoke Newington and makes the occasional appearance at Oto. He was around all week, owing to his involvement with a large compendium of Ferrari's scores and writing that was being published to coincide with the festival. Based on the recordings I'd heard I'd not expected ErikM's set to be quite so physical. He positively wrestled with his equipment, hurling out jagged fragments of sound like shrapnel. A looped phrase in French is sundered by a distorted slam like a boot on a metal panel. Pieces of incidental field recordings, animals, the rustling of leaves, morsels of glossolalia like half remembered thoughts ricochet between the speakers. Where Scanner chose to frame this hailstorm of sound against a gossamer of ambience, Moore amped it up further, intervening with waves of distortion from his electric guitar.

 

By far the most unusual and memorable of the four nights I spent that week amid the candlelight and craft beer of Cafe Oto was the third where I saw Aine O'Dwyer & Graham Lambkin perform one of Ferrari's most mysterious compositions, Unheimlich Schon (1971). The subtitle to this work - or is it in fact the score? - asks "how does a young woman breath when her mind is elsewhere?" There must have been something in the water in Paris that year as in 1971 Ferrari also completed Pornologos (of indeterminate duration, for private individuals or groups) for which he produced a score which he admitted was "almost unattainable". He also began work on one of his masterpieces, Danses Organiques (1971-1973) a remarkable expression of erotic power borne through the medium of tape manipulations, which follows two women - as the composer reveals in his notes - who meet for the first time and make love. Something of this erotic tension and mad attempt to fill the often sterile medium of concrete music with desire was present in the performance that night at Cafe Oto.

 

The realisation of the score of Unheimlich Schon is on the surface remarkably simple. It involves only microphones and a means of generating feedback on the signals they generate. The 1971 recording of the piece released in 1993 by the Metamkine label in France featured a single female voice repeating the title, her voice subjected to the most subtle of electronic manipulations and beneath which - sometimes around or above which - comes the breath which bears the erotic charge. This charge became a explosion in ultra slow motion in the hands of Aine O'Dwyer & Graham Lambkin, who, taking the basic premise, twist and turn this most pared back of performances into a tense shadow play of bodily and linguistic intensities. The key to the realisation was the use the duo made of mobile phones, which connected to each other allowed cunning use of feedback as the phone speakers were moved around the microphones, and when brought into proximity with each other. 

 

Luc Ferrari with his wife Brunhild

 

A delicate physical balance was on show where the repeated phrase of the title was joined by the question "how does a young woman breath when her mind is elsewhere?" This "elsewhere" was the unnameable void around which the two performers circled, entwining themselves and their equipment into an uncannily beautiful (which is a literal translation of the title) and perfectly poised display of erotic tension, which could actually be heard in the building of layers of controlled feedback between the human voice and its technological mediation. We, the audience sat in silence, voyeurs, captivated by this spectacle taking place a few feet in front of us. This is the magic of live music when experienced at a venue like Cafe Oto, where the intimate proximity between performers and audience can give rise to profound moments when the gap between the two seems to blur.

 

Dalson has no shortage of independent venues. During the year I visited two others within a few hundred meters of Cafe Oto, different in their own ways but similarly catering for more off the beaten track musical experiences. Evolutionary Arts Hackney (EartH) opened a couple of years ago, taking over the derelict site of the Hackney Savoy Cinema; a sumptuous venue  that includes two performance spaces and a kitchen. It was in May that I visited for the first time, passing up through the renovated, modern and rather spartan dining area before emerging out into what was formerly the large cinema auditorium. From the street you'd have no idea that such a gem of a place existed, as the bulk of the building lies behind a discrete entrance on Stoke Newington road flanked by Turkish restaurants and a barber shop.

Little has been done to bring it into the 21st century aside from making the space safe. The splendid sense of dilapidation, with bare masonry, peeling paintwork and decayed art deco fixtures is wonderfully atmospheric.  The former cinema is mostly all standing now, though on this occasion a few rows of chairs had been set up precariously along the front two wooden terraces; a concession to the more relaxed and cerebral atmosphere anticipated for the night's performers, The Necks. If Dalston were to have an in-house jazz band then it would be Australia's The Necks. The trio's regular residencies at Cafe Oto have become the stuff of legend;  a perfect place to showcase their unique blend of improvisation. Always oversubscribed a move to the larger auditorium up the street made sense. Ostensibly a classic jazz trio of Lloyd Swanson on double bass, Chris Abrahams on piano and Tony Buck on drums, their live and recorded output belies any preconception about what such trios should sound like. Each "song" ranges from twenty minutes to over an hour, often building up from quietly probing melodic lines from Abrahams piano or plucked strings from Swanson's bass. They've been variously described as ambient jazz, drone jazz or minimal electro-acoustic jazz. So there's jazz there, that we can be sure of. 

The Necks taking the applause

Whether or not they agree beforehand some direction for their live performances the result is always a unique and powerful expression of three musicians entirely in tune with each other. Long passages of raga like melodies can be followed by wild percussive interludes, droning improvisations with Abrahams scraping the strings of the piano, or Swanson firmly redirecting the piece with carefully placed interventions with his bass. All of this somehow comes back round to finish, often where they started, with those beautiful phrases from the piano. The acoustics at EartH were divine, and in the decayed splendour of the art deco cinema a different concept of time seemed at work. Moments were stretched or compressed according to the logic of The Necks. A single bass note could last an age, only to be followed by passages so full of musical life that you'd be convinced you were experiencing them at high speed. The distinctly unmodernised interior of EartH only added to the sense of being somewhere else, somewhere better.

 

A little further East from Cafe Oto, along Dalston Lane and you'll find a very different type of venue. SET Dalston is part of a multifaceted arts and community organisation with sites around the city. Visually it resembles a converted cafe or small restaurant with a performance space to one side. The roster of events is resolutely DIY with nights dedicated to poetry, modern folk, free improvisation and electronic experimentation, often featuring local artists. In October myself and a friend - admittedly "three sheets to the winds" enjoyed the wild sounds of the Chinabot label; a pioneering imprint, who in their own words are attempting to change the dialogue surrounding Asian music. Their roster includes artists based in Thailand, South Korea, India, and China itself, as well as a "digital diaspora community" based in Western countries, combining the sounds of traditional Asian music with European experimental styles.

Ohyung

 My memory of the night is a little hazy but the standout act for me was New York based Ohyung who performed an energetic set of noisy trap and synthesizer variants held together by witty socially conscious rapping, often touching on themes of racial injustice and the historical experience of the Asian diaspora in the United States. His track Park Slope is a case in point, with the repeated refrain of "Park Slope moms got black babysitters. Park Slope moms got yellow babysitters", highlighting the cosseted life and double standards of the liberal middle class in one of Brooklyn's most hipster districts. Playing to the crowd he called out for suggestions for a similarly 'BoBo' neighbourhood in London. He seemed surprised that most thought Dalston itself most fit the mould, but he happily swapped out the lyrics as my friend and I listened from a sofa in a darkened corner, close to where an upright piano had been stored out of sight beneath a black sheet. At some point during his set I began accompanying Ohyung with a few hammered low notes from out of the dark. The craft beer flows in these places.

 

I'd originally been turned onto Chinabot after researching around the work of Lawrence Lek, the filmmaker and multimedia artist whose remarkable Geomancer film I'd seen at the Bomb Factory near Archway earlier in the year. It's symbolic of London's dynamic underground arts scene that Lek later turned up at Cafe Oto playing guitar and electronics while operating his "open-world" game 2065, as it was projected onto the back wall of the performance space. The concept on the "game," like much of Lek's oeuvre, draws on themes around big-data, algorithms, and artificial intelligence to imagine a world where digital technologies have eliminated work, leaving people free to play video games all day. His films are startling CGI generated worlds which combine the artist's formal education in architecture with a gamers sensibility for space and possibility; all bound up with a vaguely apocalyptic and dystopian atmosphere. 

 

The night's performance included a walk through a virtual reality Dalston, complete with Cafe Oto rendered as a post Brexit war torn landscape. In November I saw Lek pull a similar trick at Somerset house using the room's neoclassical features as a canvas to mash together footage of Extinction Rebellion's London actions with his futuristic post-work urban environments. There seemed to be an implied criticism of UK arts institutions for their close financial relationships with major fossil fuel companies such as Shell, who under pressure from activists had earlier in the year ended their relationship with the Southbank Centre. The British Museum and Tate Galleries have come under similar pressure in relation to some of their major sponsors.

From the Corona of a Fading Star: Lockdown Musings

The other day I was sitting in my living room reading. It was hot and I had the windows open on two sides. Cool clean air blew in, bringing with it a slight scent of the cedar trees at the front of the building.  I was reading The Mirror and the Light, the concluding part to Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall trilogy. Unlike the first two volumes, which are very much historical "blockbusters", this third part is a more modernist affair; serpentine and elusive in its depiction of the last years of Thomas Cromwell at the court of Henry VIII. Nevertheless I was making good headway and the lockdown had given me an excuse to spend more time on the sofa immersed in the world of the 16th century expertly conjured by Mantel.

Suddenly it dawned on me that I never usually do that, have the big front window open for any length of time, and especially when I'm trying to concentrate on something. It opens out onto the main road and is directly in line with the aircraft that until recently would fly only a few hundred feet over my home as they come in to land at Heathrow. But these days are unlike any we've seen in living memory, certainly not since the planes started making their descent over West London, forcing a significant proportion of the capital's population to endure near permanent roaring noise from early morning through to late evening.

The other thing I noticed was the presence of many little birds in the garden. I'd heard their distinctive twittering, which contrasts with the irritating noise made by the green parakeets which like to hang out in the cherry blossom tree directly next to my bedroom window. It's as if the absence of those great mechanical birds of human invention has encouraged the more meek and attractive of London's flying creatures out of wherever they've been cowering all these years.

Even though West London is very green compared to other parts of the city I rarely see much wildlife, apart from the deer in Richmond park, urban foxes and the occasional heron. No stoats in the hedgerows. No minke whale gliding down the Thames past Old Isleworth. I've only ever seen a badger in the wild once in my life and it was running along the grass next to the A316, seemingly heading for a night out in Twickenham. I thought someone had spiked my drink. I'm an incurably urban person and still feel anxious if I happen to end up in a field with cows or horses.

I've been very lucky in lockdown. I'm on the first floor of a small block, not two dozen floors up, shut into a little box where the windows don't open and the lift is always broken. I'm able bodied and can exercise every day if I want. And most of all I'm still working, and in a relatively safe environment. More than that I'm contributing towards the development of a vaccine for coronavirus (or SARS Cov-2 as it is listed on our technical documents). It's an odd experience in the midst of this world historical event to hear projects you're involved with discussed on the radio. To hear that arrogant right wing blowhard Nick Ferrari interview someone whose name you've seen on internal emails. I don't envy people shut into their homes all day with only a short trip to the shops or local walk to break up the monotony. In truth the weekday routine between work and home is monotonous enough. Without trips out into the city it's all blurring into grey on grey.

I miss the technicolor of Soho and Dalston, of the crowds in the West End, hipsters and un-hipsters, even the tourists at the Tate and British museum. I even miss the smells of public transport. Isn't that strange? I'd never thought about how the underground smells before, but now I haven't been on it for nearly seven weeks I'm struck by the absence of that sooty, metallic, vaguely burning smell which mixes with the odours of the people who you squeeze up against; eyes fixed to floor, ceiling or phone. Never risk meeting the gaze of the Other, not in-between stations anyway. There are undoubtedly people in this city for whom the daily commute forms the most intimate experience of their lives. I wonder if they miss it the way separated couples yearn for each other's bodies?

London as tropical paradise, Battersea Park, April 2020

Cycling out West I reach the river at Hampton and head out towards Chertsey. It's striking how the character of the built environment changes once you get beyond Hampton Court, as if it functions as some ancient boundary marker or invisible checkpoint. On one side metropolitanism, on the other, "Gammon country". It's also Ballard country. Weybridge, Addlestone and Chertsey, Byfleet and New Haw; a network of satellite towns around the Western expanse of the M25 where JG Ballard set his final novel Kingdom Come. Brooklands, where the doyen of dystopian fiction located the shopping mall around which much of the novel's action happens is a real place and home to a large retail park. That's as far as the similarities go however, as the book's evocation of "St George's shirt" wearing street gangs, sports obsessives, and race riots is fanciful in the extreme to anyone who has visited these places.

Ballard actually makes this dullest of suburban enclaves sound far more multicultural than it actually is. Cycling through Weybridge or Shepperton (where Ballard lived in a non descript semi-detached house) you'd be fortunate to see any non-white faces on the street. As I cycled over Chertsey bridge a middle aged white man, his face partially covered with a scarf was standing at the kerb wagging his finger furiously at the few cyclists who were passing. "You're only allowed out for an hour, yeah!" This was his admonishment to the lycra clad hordes surging over into Surrey like Visigoths in homeopathic concentrations that Sunday morning. He looked like he'd been there a while.

There's a libidinal economy at work in following rules, a rather sad pleasure in submitting yourself to the other's demands, regardless of whether the other is really bothered or not. The psychoanalysts know this well. Masochism is an extreme variant; the self flagellating monk always gave a couple more thwacks of the whip than was strictly required by the demands of penance. Stalinism and modern managerialism continue the tradition in their own ways; fluffing up the superego, garlanding the cop inside your head. It's a matter of anticipating the other's demand and then punishing yourself a little more.  

Since the lockdown this tendency has become a real dividing line between people. You can quickly gauge which side of it a person is on as you pass them in the street. Two meters just isn't enough. I've seen people trying to squeeze themselves into cracks in the walls at twelve paces away. I see large anxious men out jogging, suffocating beneath dust masks while they work off the effects of a 24hour Pringles binge. Out in the suburbs I observed quieter streets, fewer people exercising, more obedience, and a heightened feeling of being watched. Lockdown has validated tendencies that are quintessentially "little England". The edgelands of West London are a natural breeding ground for radical curtain twitchers; people who call radio shows to demand the army shoot sunbathers in Hyde park.

NHS/Key Worker tribute Barnes, May 2020

During the first two weeks of the lockdown I seriously contemplating putting in a request to be furloughed from my job. Even though I was employed I felt obsolete, cocooned in a routine that was a little too close to normal but without any of the things which break up "normal" and render it tolerable, i.e. the excesses. Most of all those excesses shared with others. I had in mind to volunteer as a porter at West Middlesex hospital. I'd been a porter a Kings College Hospital, Lambeth (where I was born) for several months before I went to university. I remember it as a rather rewarding occupation; dashing around delivering pharmaceuticals to wards; roaming the hospital's vast Victorian basement and running up six flights of stairs carrying twenty kilos of intravenous fluids to the liver failure unit. That was a grim place, high throughput.

I also had this image of Ludwig Wittgenstein working as a porter at Guys Hospital, London Bridge during the blitz. It was typical of the man, who during his military service in WW1 would demand to be sent to the most dangerous and disease ridden posts on the Western and Russian fronts, despite apparently being eligible for a medical exemption that would have kept him away from the action entirely.  He evidently felt a desperate need to test himself, to find out if he was worthy of living. It's an ethic I deeply admire. There's a blue plaque at Guys (at the part that's now Kings College Student Union), close to the statue of John Keats, which commemorates the Austrian philosopher's contribution. I've felt a bit more useful since I've been working on vaccines for the present pandemic. Essential work, but behind the front lines.

I've been reading a lot of "down and out" literature during lockdown; Knut Hamsun, Charles Bukowski. It's the OUT part that's attractive right now. A great deal of Hamsun's Hunger takes place on the streets of his fictional city Kristiania. I find myself envious of characters in novels who enjoy chance encounters while out Flâneuring. It's an experience which the surrealist André Breton called The Marvellous. Right now there is little marvellous about being around other people out of doors. They cower, shrink and avoid eye contact. Either that or they ostentatiously barge through sending the fearful scurrying into corners. The great surge of public feeling towards health workers is not mirrored in the everyday experience of shopping for groceries. At the supermarket - which is now marked out like a cross between a military exercise and a Japanese gameshow - people do not speak, nor do they linger to peruse the inessential items on the shelves that once captivated them. Alcohol is an essential item, especially alcohol.

Face coverings are becoming more common and with them an increasing sense of distance and alienation. Seeing the faces of other people is closely linked to a feeling of shared ethical experience, as Levinas teaches: "the facing position, opposition par excellence, can be only as a moral summons. [...] The epiphany of the face is ethical". Combine this creeping 'covering-up' with the suspicion that what lurks beneath the veil is contamination and potential death for you and your loved ones, then the suggestion that the pandemic will lead to the rediscovery of "real life" encounters away from digital mediations sounds like fools hope.

Hammersmith, April 2020

I don't suffer from the agoraphobia that has taken hold of otherwise reasonable people lately. While I follow the guidance for social distancing I bend the stick where my sanity and sense of autonomy require. Exercise once a day? No problem, how's an 18 mile walk to Battersea and back sound to you?; how's 50km on the bike up to Finsbury park and back? Throw in a loop around Kensington for good measure. London streets are rarely this empty and safe, so why pass up the opportunity? In the long run stick bending is better for your health than cowering under the bedclothes with the miasmas. One's immediate response to the imposition of a rule - especially when that rule comes from government - should not be to obey but to interpret. We are all jurists in the court of our own reason. Improvising around rules, as opposed to blind obedience, is what distinguishes adults from children. It's also what makes jazz great.

A friend of mine told me that his sister and their family had taken to building dens out of tree branches in their garden. He'd been led to believe this was an "on-trend" activity among the "gardened" classes under lockdown. I thought of the characters at the end of Lars von Trier's Melancholia, hurriedly building just such a symbolic shelter, as the vast form of the green planet hurtling towards them envelopes the horizon before annihilating everything in a firestorm. In the film, building the den was preferred to the suggestion made by Charlotte Gainsbourg's character to drink wine on the veranda. I'm yet to grasp the sentiment, so am still occasionally drinking beer in the park, sans shelter.

Melancholia highlights another prescient phenomena, that of the thriving lockdown depressive. The reasoning has it that persons of a depressive or pessimistic outlook find less has changed in the world relative to their expectations and so find it easier to adapt. This has been termed depressive realism, which broadly supposes that non-depressed people hold a “positivity bias” which colours their general outlook, whereas the supposed “negativity bias” of the depressive actually gives a more realistic appraisal of the world. Research has yet to bear this out, but right now who can argue with them?

60% of people in a recent poll would feel uncomfortable going outside even if the government lifted lockdown restrictions. Whether this is irrational fear of the outdoors or rational fear that the government is lying to them about it being safe is unclear. The truth is that long before the fateful meeting between a bat and pangolin in a Wuhan wet market, the nation's collective mental state had been none too robust. Incidentally, throw in a Catholic priest to the above ensemble and you've got the set-up for the best joke of 2020.

The last two years of Brexit chaos have resulted in huge levels of political fatigue and generalised social angst. In the autumn last year, leading up to the general election there were times - usually after some divisive outburst from Boris or one of his "disaster nationalist" minions - that I could feel the tension and discontent in the train carriages as I travelled into Waterloo. A frequent smell of strong booze and an equally strong feeling that given half a chance things could seriously kick off. It's hardly surprising considering the degree of cognitive dissonance we've been subjected to over the last few years that many people would rather shelter at home regardless of what the government says. Coronavirus could be fake news or Godzilla in invisible form. Either way it's safer in the toilet roll igloo, with the box sets and free porn. 

Walking the city is a delight. Whenever I've spent substantial time walking across London previously I've always ended up with a layer of grime to wash off myself at my destination (that's pollution not UK Hip-hop). I can't usually wear contact lenses for more than a few hours in the city centre because of all the airborne filth. But on the walks I've taken into zone 1 over the last month it's undeniable how much clearer and fresh the air is. Roads are quiet, frequented now by an increasing number of families who go out cycling in unison. Some of them could do with a bit of practice, but it's preferable I think to dodging shark-eyed and over caffeinated commuters on their racing bikes trying to beat their personal best from Bank to Putney. If this crisis does lead to an increase in cycling in the capital I hope it looks more like cycling in the centre of towns in the Emilia Romagna region of Italy. There it's almost exclusively inexpensive hybrids people use, and the roads are restricted to cars in a variety of ways to make cycling safer for people of all ages. And you see them, grandmothers and students all together without a "performance jersey" in sight.

Cafe Oto boarded up, Dalston April 2020

The square mile is especially ghostly right now. Cycling east through Chiswick I reach Hyde park and head along South Carriage Drive until I cross the A4 and pass underneath the Wellington arch, upon which sits the monumental bronze quadriga carrying the goddess Nike, resplendent astride her chariot. In Shoreditch and Elephant and Castle local artists have painted murals depicting NHS nurses in PPE. They stare out like images of saints and revolutionaries seen on the sides of buildings in Latin America. Saints is perhaps more apt, the presence of the mask there to remind us of the risks frontline healthcare workers are taking for our salvation. But salvation to what? 

I had the idea - an awful liberal compromise of course - that Labour should press for legislation to write the NHS as a universal, publicly funded and free at point of use health service, into the British constitution. Perhaps as part of the Royal demesne? The most attractive part of this plan is that in keeping with a long standing tradition, any attempt to sell the health service off would be deemed treasonable, as it assails the property of Crown. And who would pass up the opportunity to see the intestines of certain Conservative politicians pulled out at Tower Hill? Currently the opposition are doing little but acting like an echo chamber for the government. But hey, Starmer is "electable" and that's all that matters right?

Iain Sinclair talks about the "captured" city as a way of describing the wholesale handing over of large swaths of London to developers and the subsequent destruction of community life. Previously public spaces are privatised and securitised. The city is rendered "unnavigable" to walkers, to those who seek occluded histories buried beneath the rising towers of glass and steel. Several square kilometres around Kings Cross station have been turned into a testing ground for facial recognition technology designed by Google, whose UK headquarters sits at its heart. Fail to comply with mandated forms of consumption and you'll quickly be confronted by private security advising you to move on, the features of your visage forever consigned to the Great Memory.

The infrastructure for the kinds of technology being mooted, and in some cases rolled out, across the globe as a way to track people suspected of carrying coronavirus is already in place across much of the UK. There is a frightening similarity between the asymptomatic carrier of coronavirus who must shun physical proximity with others for the sake of potential contagion, and the logic of the security apparatus of modern states, for which all citizens are potential terrorists/subversives; a logic which time and again is used to justify increases in surveillance and mass gathering of data from the public. The present crisis will see unprecedented use of such technologies and possibly even the sharing of medical records with big data monopolies like, you guessed it, Google.

What we've totally lost over these past weeks is something that's been slowly seeping out of urban life for years; the spontaneity, the "Marvelous", the unscripted and digitally unmediated encounter. Things get worse but they don't get more interesting. That's the problem for me; an empire in decay can be an aesthetically pleasing thing, but there's nothing in the infantilised drudgery of our ever more digitally mediated dystopia to get the blood flowing, to return the witness to life more violently (to paraphrase the painter Francis Bacon). The city as an imminent space of social life is the mortal enemy of cyberspace. Perhaps, but who has time for imminence anymore? Who bothers to look up at the sky or take notice as their city is transformed into a vast gated foreign investment portfolio? What sort of metropolis of "managed flows" and "regulated exchanges" do we have to look forward to in the wake of the pandemic? What will people put up with?

Isleworth, May 2020

The seemingly opposed imperatives of preserving the economy and of preserving public health are in fact predicated on the same form of governance; the former is geared towards managing populations towards maximising capital accumulation, encouraging appropriate market behaviour, etc; while the latter strips the concept of economy (oikonomia) back to its bare bones by directing the management of people and things solely towards the preservation of biological existence. Both are quintessentially "economical" in foundation, born of a total surrender of individual and collective agency to technocratic management and sham politics. The phrase "being led by the science" is a child of the latter.

Economics presupposes a neutral domain from which it can govern. There is no such thing. Economic "science" places the burden of neutrality onto the scientific advice to which planners and politicians choose to listen. And it is resolutely a choice.  Isn't it all very convenient? In a week that the government announces its strategy for easing the lockdown, Neil Ferguson, the Imperial College professor whose predictions of mass death led to the lockdown in the first place, is captured by the Tory supporting Telegraph newspaper receiving his "married lover" (notice the appeal to the ever present Victorian moral sensibility there) at his home against his own advice. It's almost as if they felt they had given him too much credibility and needed to remove him from the picture to open the way for a new strategy. Discrediting him as a "lockdown hypocrite" delegitimizes in advance any criticisms he might make of the government's management of the crisis.

I mentioned the Giorgio Agamben controversy in brief in one of my previous "plague" pieces. It's a measure of the unthinking "will-to-cancel" that is so common now among apparently educated people that a philosopher who has done more than most to spell out the ever present dangers of sovereign power is cast into the proverbial pit with the conspiraloons and MAGA hat wearing neck beards. Along the fault line separating high anxiety from depressive accommodation sit those for whom any concern for a liveable future beyond the corona-horizon is tantamount to desiring mass cremation pits for the over 70s.  It's symptomatic of the reflexive impotence that grips our epoch that anyone who wants to think beyond the present crisis, to safeguard a world worth living in, are dismissed as death cultists or even Trump supporters.

It's a great shame for the Left that the open veneration of life (that is of course a "doing" word) and liberty is now most frequently articulated by the worst elements of the Right. Put aside the denialism and conspiracy theories and there are other non-Stoic, non-economic arguments against prolonging the lockdown longer than is necessary. The explosion of domestic violence and the forcing of millions of people into penury chiefly among them. I trust the mind that always questions government demands over the one that complies by default. I know who would be more likely to denounce me to the Gestapo. It is not a virtue to readily accommodate oneself to the loss of human intimacy, to allowing people to die alone, to be buried or burned without ceremony. Agamben is spot on in his observation that at no time in the history of our species have these things been forcibly prohibited by governments.

There were hopes that all this spare time might give people the opportunity to consider what is important for them in life. This is another fools hope assumption, that when bad things happen people necessarily start questioning themselves. What actually happens in the face of a major loss of control over our lives is that people often further narrow their horizons. Thinking is after all the hardest thing to do, made all the harder when a state of necessity prevails that deactivates all critical thought in favour of pure bodily survival. Constant inertia does not breed vitality of mind. There were poets in the trenches, there are none in the toilet roll igloo.

All of which makes it likely that any post crisis reinvigoration of social values will occur in an atmosphere of greater social atomisation. Whatever the next few weeks hold as the government attempts to bluster its way out of lockdown, the only certainty is that things will be different, but there’s no guarantee they’ll be better.

Plague Power #2: States of Exception and the Demobilised Zoon Politikon

1.

Total mobilisation was one of the key military concepts bequeathed to us from the war experience of the 20th century. It finds its counterpart today under conditions of pandemic in the notion of total confinement. If, as Ernst Jünger puts it, total mobilisation is the conversion of life into energy at the level of the society, then total confinement must be the withdrawal of energy from that same social life. What is essential to note is that in both instances it is life which is the object of conversion or diminution. But the life targeted here is not the mere biological life of the human animal but the life particular to homo sapiens as the zoon politikon, the political animal of Aristotle's philosophy.

Under conditions of total mobilisation the energy of an entire population is harnessed as projective force to secure its survival in wars, which thanks to the reign of destructive technology, have become equally total. Thus, contrary to the rhetoric of "defending our way of life", which we still hear from politicians today, the life being secured in such cases is not that of the zoon politikon - the qualified form-of-life which the Greeks called bios - but rather it is the bare biological life of the population, which is the life common to all living things. We thus have a paradox of sorts, where the form-of-life that is most particular to humans is being sacrificed, converted by the great war machine of modern states for the sake of saving, or preserving its biological life.

At this level the two concepts, total mobilisation and total confinement, are entirely aligned. In both cases power sacrifices what is most proper to the human in order to conserve (and in the process capture) its biological existence.

This process is a familiar theme in the political writings of Giorgio Agamben, for whom the State of Exception (which total mobilisation and total confinement are extreme iterations) is the moment when the otherwise regulated relationship between power, life and Law is broken, and power (specifically sovereign power) appears in its most arbitrary and potentially murderous form.

We have got used to thinking of power under neoliberalism in that "capillary" model that Foucault described so well in the 1970s; reaching down to the smallest quanta of human activity; monitoring, recording, governing and conducting; and usually coupled - in his account - with a corresponding loss of the sovereign or charismatic mode of governing. As the entropy of government increases, power and authority become diffuse, unlocalisable to a central point. "Central government" then becomes little more than a clearing house. This is the type of elite technocratic governance caricatured by modern populists like Donald Trump, Bolsonaro, Salvini and the rest.

Now, what we're observing under conditions of contagion is the blood being drawn back from the extremities, back into the major arteries of state and police functions. The current pandemic has confirmed much of what we knew or at least suspected was always in the arsenal of modern states in the era of smart phones, big data and the complete interpenetration of civil and security technologies.

2.

In February you'd be forgiven in Europe for watching with a wry smile as the Chinese deployed drones to track individuals suspected of carrying the virus, and even confronting people deemed outside unnecessarily, sometimes following them back to their homes. Only a few short weeks later the tactics we'd like to palm off onto undemocratic states like China appeared in Spain and in the UK, where in Derbyshire the police (in a typically English display of pettiness) used a drone to film people walking their dogs or driving to secluded country spots to take their exercise, neither of which are prohibited under the new "guidelines". 

A similar functional adaptation has been seen with the use of smart phone tracking and card transactions to monitor where infected persons have been and who they may have come into contact with. In Israel and elsewhere all that has been needed to achieve this is the generalising of already existing anti-terror legislation to cover all citizens; an age old slippage that has been repeated throughout modern history where provisions originally designed for criminals get migrated over to the general population. Bertillon cards, the precursor to the modern biometric ID card developed by Alphonse Bertillon in the late 19th century is exemplary in this regard. It should not surprise us that early biometrics were pioneered by the son of a statistician working as a clerk for the Parisian police. Google have now weighed in, helpfully offering to make mobility data from tracking your phone available to help governments "manage the outbreak".

As well as enabling extrapolitical measures likes these, governments around the world have been passing emergency legislation giving them bold new powers over everything from speeding up burials, to closing down schools, shops and business, to detaining those suspected of being infected with the virus. In France where an especially severe lockdown has been implemented, individuals need to fill out a form before they can leave their own homes and present it to any police officer who challenges them. Tens of thousands of fines have already been issued to people deemed to be outside unnecessarily.

Throughout continental Europe only food shopping for essential items is now permitted, though there is no advice on what precisely these essential items are. One might well ask, if only the essentials should be purchased why are supermarkets still selling anything else? In the UK there have been incidents of police searching through shopping bags, with Easter eggs falling foul of the restrictions. In wartime, essential food items were defined and allocated through the rationing system. Inessential items were more or less unavailable. Bananas were one item that vanished from shop shelves entirely during the 1940s.

Without a transparent and properly defined system the police have effectively been given arbitrary powers, and worryingly have had to be reminded that they should be sticking within the guidelines rather than adopting the interpretations of ministers given during press conferences as instructions. At the bottom of that particular slippery slope lies fuhrerprinzip and Nomos Empsychos (living Law).

The Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban is never one to let a crisis go to waste. Last week, as a response to the pandemic his country's parliament voted to give him the power to rule by decree indefinitely. Hungary thus becomes the EUs first bona fide dictatorship; though as yet there is no talk of kicking them out of that accommodating club. Orban's powers arrived with additional legislation outlawing "fake news" about the government's response to the virus. Anyone deemed by the State to be spreading misinformation could be jailed for up to five years. Orban's power grab, as well as punitive measures and emergency powers adopted by governments across the world amplifies an authoritarian trend which was already in process long before the current crisis.

It's important however not to overstate the totalitarian potential at work in these events. Jünger's total mobilisation is more of a regulating ideal than an actually achieved state of affairs, and the same goes for total confinement. In the UK the memory of the riots in the summer of 2011 is still strong, and with police numbers having fallen by 20,000 over the intervening period the capacity for law enforcement in the case of widespread civil disobedience is limited.

Despite briefings to the contrary there is widespread belief that the UK's relatively mild lockdown conditions reflect the Conservative government's continued commitment to a strategy of "herd immunity". Hardly constituting a strategy at all, it is in effect allowing the virus to tear through the country so that enough people contract, survive, and build immunity that in great enough numbers would act like a firebreak against further epidemics. The cost of this strategy would be tens of thousands of preventable deaths, not only from Covid-19 but from other medical conditions that an overwhelmed health service could not properly treat. Formally such planed negligence would be the opposite of an authoritarian response, but it is no less destructive, no less biopolitical in its cold economic calculation of mass death and suffering.

There is undoubtedly a danger in all this is that once the pandemic passes we will be faced with years of struggle to roll back the sweeping powers assumed by the State, which will likely be redeployed to serve other purposes and other "emergencies", depending on their perceived utility. Fears over the disappearance of cash, the further erosion of privacy, and the integration of big data across government and corporate institutions are all valid concerns under circumstances where oversight is limited and the normal rules don't apply.

3.

The last few weeks have seen states take actions that we had been led to believe were impossible; massive injections into the economy for the sake of safeguarding workers, the debt of the NHS written off, railway and airline companies renationalised, hospitals constructed in days. All these things that in the UK were propagandised against by the Conservative party during the general election of December 2019. Thinking back to Thomas Hobbes, it’s as if the miraculous power which Western politics has for centuries thought it had cast out from the concept of sovereignty has returned, with the Leviathan revealing itself once more as “that mortal God” to which we owe, under the immortal God, our peace and defence.

There is an intense need for awareness and scrutiny of the decisions being taken in the present circumstances, and to resist the urge - in a situation of understandable fear and uncertainty - of collapsing all social and political life into the management of the (biological) life of the people. Dark undertones have already been glimpsed, such as 'do not resuscitate' (DNR) forms being sent out to disabled people by some GPs in the UK as part of the Coronavirus response. Battlefield triage is the paradigm being reached for to describe the extremely tough decisions having to be made by doctors allocating scarce resources to so many critically ill people. It is one of the very few scenarios where a strict application of the utilitarian principle of maximising quality of life outcomes for the greatest number of people is the most appropriate ethical response. However, generalised to public policy and welfare it very quickly turns into eugenics. 

Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, who has done more than anyone in warning of the dangers of a generalised state of exception, has been accused of downplaying the significance of the Coronavirus pandemic and the need for drastic action in a piece for Quodlibet. 

The piece, written at the end of February, does indeed seem naive in its assessment of the impact of the outbreak and the Italian government's measures which he describes as "frenetic, irrational and entirely unfounded".  However in a clarification issued shortly afterwards the properly ethical philosophical core of his position is clearer:  

"The first thing that the wave of panic that has paralyzed the country obviously shows is that our society no longer believes in anything but bare life. ... Bare life - and the danger of losing it - is not something that unites people, but blinds and separates them. ... People have been so habituated to live in conditions of perennial crisis and perennial emergency that they don’t seem to notice that their life has been reduced to a purely biological condition, as has not only every social and political dimension, but also human and affective. A society that lives in a perennial state of emergency cannot be a free society. We in fact live in a society that has sacrificed freedom to so-called “reasons of security” and has therefore condemned itself to live in a perennial state of fear and insecurity".

The point to make here is that this is not a moral condemnation of the emergency measures taken by governments; it would be foolish to suggest that the "virtue" of the governing class should somehow form a bulwark against the despotism of technicity, or that there was some other obvious response to the pandemic that should have been adopted. What we are seeing now has always been there as a capacity and a real possibility. As Agamben has repeatedly argued - following the insight of Walter Benjamin - the state of exception in which we now live has become the rule. The Coronavirus pandemic functions like a moment of concentration in which political, governmental, and also ethical and social forms are revealed to be shot through with an already existing weight of fear and anxiety. We were already afraid, and were already habituated to sacrificing our freedom to health and security, to the empty city depicted on the frontispiece to Hobbes' Leviathan. What is happening now - while far from an authoritarian takeover - is an acceleration of a process that has been underway for decades.

The Dance of Death - 16th Century German, annonymous artist

Finally, it is worth bearing in mind that there is another side to the "dream" of plague uncovered by Foucault's researches, one pregnant with images of individuals throwing off their masks (metaphorically but may as well be literally) and abandoning their social status to the great debauchery of those who know they are going to die. "Plague overcomes the law just as it overcomes the body". An overcoming of Law and the contiguity between a state of exception and a state of festive anomie is similarly evoked in Agamben's extensive writings. If there is a deeper meaning to the pandemic, one that might point the way towards a different kind of world and a different kind of life in the aftermath, then it may be found here.